I recently purchased a new tablet PC and while its freaking awesome I am extremely disappointed in one program. The program is basically a calculator embedded into a piece of paper. I, in theory, can write out a formula circle it with the lasso and have it solve the equation. Which is just unbelievibly awesome and an absolute paradigm shift in the way to do math/engineering problems. Plus it has a bunch of higher level features like DiffEQ’s, integrals and graphing multi-variable equations. Frankly this program was one of the biggest reasons that I wanted the tablet PC.
Unfortunately the program just flat out doesn’t work. Its not even close.
The handwritten number is what I inputted to have the program solve and what you see at the bottom left is what it it gave me. Yes thats right, I tried to input (100/5)71 and it gave me 1. I don’t know what it interpeted my writing as or if it just sucks at math but thats ridiculous.
As you can see in that example it somehow took my 9 from the middle of the input and not only decided it was an ‘a’ it put it at the end of the formula. Plus it completely missed the 10^6. I estimate in playing around with the program I got it to recognize correctly my input 3-5% of the time. Thats not even close to being good enough to make it an effective tool.
Such high expectations, such piss poor results. Not to mention the $100 I spent that if I can’t get back will cause me to absolutely flip out on some poor person.
Must you entrain it? Is there a “learning” component? Maybe you can adjust with a more formally written pattern, perhaps more distinction in your construction?
You haven’t had an awful lot of disappointments in your life, have you?
I work in the software industry and, frankly, (100/5)71=1 doesn’t sound all that bad to me. A touch off, perhaps, but you have to remember our governing philosophy: Close enough, they’ll figure it out. Let’s move on…
The only one that learns in this situation is me. I would stick with it and try ot be more distinctive in my writing but how do you know what to be more distinctive about when its screwing up as monumentally as it is?
Alright, perhaps that was a bit of hyperbole but I was really, really looking foward to this program and it was so terribly bad.
At least there is good news, my calculator has somehow regained the ghost overnight.
Looks like it thought 10^6 was 106. And with regards to the 9/a confusion, it looks to me as though it’s not even worked it out correctly, if you had intended to input “a” - it’s put the a in such a position that it is multiplied by 1547.7 - which it wasn’t in your original entry.
